She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.

I think my greatest talent really is for friendship.

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods.

People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.

Poor slob without a name. It's a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven't the right to give him one: he'll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don't belong to each other: he's an independent, and so am I. I don't want to own anything until I know I've found the place where me and things belong together.

I'm one of the world's greatest pencil sharpeners.